onsdag 31 juli 2013

This last week I've been writing on how to create a political ideology in a constructive manner. The goal was to create a guide which lets one think about the most important questions in politics while not first deciding that one is a conservative, social-democrat, feminist, libertarian, or any other political identity with a certain script to follow.

The essence of the tutorial is to make lists on the most important topics in politics. Here is a summary of all the lists one should make:

The most important political goals you want to achieve, without stating what particular means are best appropriate for them (e.g. world peace, prosperity, freedom). (Choose That Which is Most Important to You.)

All societies/political systems.

Those beliefs you have which explain most about human behavior and how our societies function.

Those beliefs you have which dismisses most political systems as not being best suited to your preferences.

Every list is necessary to get a complete ideology but 1 to 5 are, by far, the most important ones. Because, by solving these points you are able to tell which type of society is the
best.

Besides writing down these lists one should also consider the different benefits and costs of striving towards a political goal. If the best societies one can think of are reached by means which make it harder to reach another good society, it could be that the second (or third) best society is better than the first, if the cost of reaching them are sufficiently low. (Strive Towards the (Second) Best Society.)

tisdag 30 juli 2013

If your political strategy calls for you to convince others* that your cause is just and right, you should be able to present the most compelling arguments for your case. This means you need to be very familiar with your own reasoning, with those values and facts you believe to be the most important for shaping your political choice. This does not mean that the best way of convincing someone is by stating propositions, although I believe it has a positive appeal for 10-90% of the population.

At best you shouldn't discuss the solution, the society you want, but focus on the facts which support it. Because, you will maybe need to shift your position if the one you debate with shows that one or several of your beliefs are mistaken. And that is probably easier when not feeling such an attachment to the ultimate society. But, this is probably impossible because most people will want to know about this society, and how it functions, from you. So, you'll need to learn how to discuss questions about it. That is, you'll need to create a list of F.A.Q. on your own politics.

It should also be necessary to discuss other political choices and why they are not as good as your own, to those you wish to convince. This can be done in two ways: influencing someone's goals or influencing their most important factual beliefs about the world. The first one can possibly by done by thought experiments to show someone what their true preferences are. The second by reasonings on how a particular society will not achieve the objectives sought after. And these lists need to be multiplied by the number of seriously considered alternatives.

For this post I don't have any list at all since they are entirely dependent on what debate one engages in.

* This might not be important at all for several reasons. You might be in a political group with a division of labor where someone else is comparatively better at communication. You might be able to reach your goal already. Your other political actions might speak louder than words.

måndag 29 juli 2013

For most political strategies to work, it's necessary to cooperate with others. Here I'll discuss what the members of alliances can have in common, how the alliances can be structured, and how secret they can be.

Alliances of Preferences, Perspectives, and End Goals

There can exist at least four types of alliances, those of:

preferences, where everyone cares about roughly the same values;

perspectives (on society), where everyone has the same model on how societies work;

perspectives (on strategies), where everyone believe that a certain was of action is the best one to follow; and

end goals, where everyone wants to achieve the same society (albeit maybe for different reasons and with different strategies).

The ultimate alliance would then be between those who share the same views on all of these questions. All the others will either have the potential to become ultimate alliances or not. When would some alliances never become ultimate alliances? Or, when would two individuals never join in that alliance?

That seems to only be possible when they share different
values, when some member's values restrict him/her from from using some
source of information or method of reasoning, or when the members don't
have enough time to discuss a matter. Because, if everyone who believed in the same basic rules of reasoning (which most people do, although not for all problems) they are bound to reach the same conclusion, if they discuss the problem long enough.

Alliances between representatives and non-representatives

I believe alliances can be structured in at least four ways:

Non-representatives - These, who gather for some purpose, only represent themselves. When they say ”I agree” they mean just that, that their own process of thought have led them to the conclusion that what someone said is true.

Constrained representatives – These represent someone else's opinions and can be in the alliance only because they do so. If they step out of bounds their principals will select another agent to represent them.

Empowered representatives – These have some principals who give them their strength but they have faith in their representatives and will simply acquiesce in their decisions.

Similar representatives – These have principals but they all think more or less the same. So if this representative takes a controversial stance, when the principal learn of the reason for it they will agree that it was the most prudent action.

The last three groups are probably difficult to differentiate in practice. No one would consider themselves to be principals of the first kind, but that might just be what most voters are.

Why is this important? Well, because large alliances probably needs to consist of representatives. Otherwise there would be too few decisions per meeting. If they need representatives to function effectively, it should be necessary that the representatives know enough about their principals, and vice versa. Because only then can members of an alliance select representatives who will reason and act just as they would, which seems to be the ideal.

Open and secret alliances

An alliance might have secrets they do not share with the rest of the society or they might be open about their intents and views. How open/secret an alliance is might be measured on a scale from one to ten. On the one end no one except the members of the alliance knows about its existence, its views or goals. On the other they post everything they do and think on twitter. In the middle people don't acknowledge they are part of any political alliance, or they keep their perspectives, strategies, or preferences a secret.

To gain an understanding of this goal it might, again, be best to not list proposals and search arguments for them. Instead one should list facts which should be on one's mind when forming the optimal strategy. What sorts of facts are then important to know about?

They will probably have to do with how others change their behaviour. That is, people act according to pattern X today, and you want them to act according to pattern Y. What does one need to know when planning for this?

Similar to when trying to figure out what society best fits your ideal, you should now (1) list all possible political strategies, (2) list the most explanatory facts regarding how people change their behaviour, (3) list the facts that disparages most strategies, and (4) list all ideas which, if you knew them, would settle the matter or damn a whole many other strategies. (Also, saying one thing necessarily means saying the entire theory which supports that statement, which needs to be remembered when discussing with others.)

(The authors use the metaphors the rider and the elephant for our minds, originally from Buddha, recently written on by Jonathan Haidt and Daniel Kahneman. The rider is the self-aware part of the brain and the elephant is everything that does stuff automatically, sort of.)

The specific method:

"There are three main sources of influence that shape political orientation which creates long-term effects. [Family, teachers/instructors, and peers.]" (Theories of political behavior)

The searchmethod:

"What will it take to get the necessary number of people to engage in one massive action, or series of actions, that will change the world into society/societies X/YZ?"

Whatever you have calculated to be your best solution it may not be what you should be aiming towards. If the society you most want to live in is very different from your second preferred society, and working towards establishing one will decrease the chances of establishing another, there is potentially a dilemma here. (Such as, if one would either want a capitalistic or communistic society.) On the other hand, if working toward any society is a step towards any other you prefer, there is no conflict. Here, I'll assume there is one.

Let us say you have five particular political orders which you would say are each adequate, but that you can rank them clearly from good to better. Now, try and determine how easy it should be to reach these goals, let's just say in how many hours of work you need to put into it. To illustrate:

Rank

Option

Difficulty

1

Atlantis

1,000 years

2

Eden

1,500 years

3

Lemuria

50 years

4

Ultima Thule

500 years

5

Status Quo

Instant success

For the hypothetical person who have these societal preferences, the question is whether to pursue either the #1 or the #3 choice (#1 is, for these variables, superior to #2 and the same with #3 to #4). It could be solved easily enough, if all goals and costs were measured in the same nominator. Neoclassical economists do this by assuming everything can be nominated in monetary terms, even though it's not correct, but because it seems to be better than nothing. To illustrate, let's put some numbers to the societies above:

Option

Value ($)

Cost ($)

New Rank

Atlantis

5,000,000

4,000,000

2

Eden

4,500,000

6,000,000

5

Lemuria

4,000,000

100,000

1

Ultima Thule

3,900,000

5,000,000

4

Status Quo

1,000

0

3

So, when everything has been calculated for, this person should strive towards establishing Lemuria. After having followed the same logic you should be able to discover what your efficient political goal is.

How to make this calculation, then? To do so it is necessary to think about the most efficient strategy that can be used to, together with others, reach a certain society, This will also be useful if the most adequate societies you know of are very similar to each other, such as walking towards on is walking towards all, more or less. I'll discuss the question of best strategy in the next post.

fredag 26 juli 2013

After you have written down what your own fundamental political goals are, the next step in creating your political ideology is to get an understanding of all possible societies
so you can see which one is best. And by best I mean that society which
comes closest to meeting your criteria of what you find most valuable.

So, to construct a model for thinking about this issue two things are
needed. First, a list of all possible societies. For that I'll use, as a proxy, Wikipedia's list of economic systems and how they might vary with what culture is most prominent in that system.

Secondly, some lists of
those facts which would seem to rule out the largest number of possible
societies as not being best. My reasoning for that is the following:

Before
considering any facts that has an impact on how you view a society, all
societies should appear to be equally probable of being the best. This
starting point may seem strange to some. It means that one should not
dismiss even the policies of Nazi Germany out of hand. That is just the
starting point however. After one accumulates more and more data some
societies will appear less and less probable to be the one that best fulfill
your criteria.And, since you don't have time to read everything, it is necessary to
construct a model of how humans (and other beings, for post-singularity
issues, which i'll skip discussing) function and interact, that first only considers the most important facts.

This could be done in several ways.

One could begin by just following normal science and ask what general
facts can explain most of observed behavior and then see what those
facts would predict about all societies. That seems wise to do, in and
of itself, because it forces the discussion (which will ensue with
others who follow the same method) to be very methodical and well
grounded in a rich theory. One's own viewpoint will also be more likely to be true. This can be called the general method.

But this path is not the quickest, since these general facts would
probably not damn enough societies to be unsuitable to your goals. A
much faster way, but which will give a more sketchy painting, is to
just list those facts which will rule out the most societies. These facts may be
thought of by thinking on what assumptions certain systems rely on to
work adequately and trying to figure out what facts disprove most of
these assumptions. This can be called the specific method.

Then there are statements which you are uncertain about but if they
were true, it would become really obvious what society is best. So, not
facts actually, but those ideas which you believe are worth learning
more about. These potential facts should be the ones you are pondering
or those which are the root cause of many debates among those with
similar goals. This can be called the search method.

So, for the first two method you'll write down what you already believe and for the third you'll write down what you don't know, but would like to know if they're true or not. Here's an illustration of them, using information from Wikipedia's articles on humans, society, societal collapse, war. I only took three examples for the specific method and search method.

The general method:

"Human societies are characterized by patterns of relationships (social relations) between individuals who share a distinctive culture and institutions; a given society may be described as the sum total of such relationships among its constituent members."

"Humans are adept at utilizing systems of symbolic communication
such as language and art for self-expression, the exchange of ideas,
and organization."

"Virtually all societies have developed some degree of inequality among
their people through the process of social stratification, the division
of members of a society into levels with unequal wealth, prestige, or
power."

"Humans are generally diurnal. The average sleep
requirement is between seven and nine hours per day for an adult and
nine to ten hours per day for a child; elderly people usually sleep for
six to seven hours. Having less sleep than this is common among humans,
even though sleep deprivation
can have negative health effects. A sustained restriction of adult
sleep to four hours per day has been shown to correlate with changes in
physiology and mental state, including reduced memory, fatigue,
aggression, and bodily discomfort."

"Motivation is the driving force of desire behind all deliberate actions of humans. Motivation is based on emotion—specifically, on the search for satisfaction (positive emotional experiences), and the avoidance of conflict."

"For humans, sexuality
has important social functions: it creates physical intimacy, bonds and
hierarchies among individuals, besides ensuring biological reproduction."

"Insofar as it is collaborative,
a society can enable its members to benefit in ways that would not
otherwise be possible on an individual basis; both individual and social
(common) benefits can thus be distinguished, or in many cases found to
overlap."

"Common factors that may contribute to societal collapse are economic,
environmental, social and cultural, but they manifest combined effects
like a whole system out of balance. In some cases a natural disaster
(e.g. tsunami, earthquake, massive fire or climate change) may seem to be an immediate cause. Other factors such as a Malthusian catastrophe, overpopulation or resource depletion
might be the proximate cause of collapse. Significant inequity may
combine with lack of loyalty to a central power structure and result in
an oppressed lower class rising up and taking power from a smaller
wealthy elite. The diversity of forms that societies evolve corresponds
to diversity in their failures too."

"There is no scholarly agreement on which are the most common motivations for war. ... The one constant factor is war’s employment of organized violence and
the resultant destruction of property and/ or lives that necessarily
follows."

The search method:

Political system X will best achieve my goals.

Political system X leads to the best incentives for everyone to produce the most important collective goods.

Political system X leads to the best incentives for everyone to not hurt anyone else.

Now, these facts are not simply facts. They are the tip of a theoretical ice-berg; they are interpretation of reality. As such they
will not by themselves explicate what system they damn. For oneself they
should be clear what they mean, but if one should discuss it with
others it might be necessary to write down the points and their
theoretical point of view explicitly.

In any case, if you've followed my steps you should have one
candidate which seems to be best. Or at least a few which seems equally good. If not, then consider some more facts and/or search for more knowledge. This step might, of course, take
years. Next step is to estimate how much a
political action towards these societies might cost.

To create your own political world view
you need to know about societies and your own political goals/values.
In this post I'll discuss the latter, and in the next post the former.

What sort of goals? Those which you wish to achieve for their own
sake, and not because they simply are a means to an end. That is, those
goals you value intrinsically.
Or, if you believe that there exists only one ultimate goal or value,
then think of those means which are not that far removed from being
intrinsic goal. That is, a birthday party might be just of instrumental value
but most would agree that it is more far away from the intrinsic value
than, say, good tires. I will for the rest of the post assume that most
people value a lot of things intrinsically, and by values I will denote
intrinsic values.

So, I'd like to draw a line between values and that which achieve
those values. The latter is what we're trying to figure out what they
are, without first proposing what they are.
Those are political systems, or parts of them; they are institutions
and laws. This is not to say that these things cannot be valued for
their own sake – I put value on a system, possibly for aesthetic reasons
– but those values should be disentangled from the other benefit a
system produces.

With that in mind, you should now list all the things you value in
ranking order. To rank them is necessary since we live in a world of
scarce resources, so you won't necessarily achieve all your goals, but
you will want to achieve those that are most important to you.

There are three things to keep in mind here. First that goals can change, but they are still important to know about, even if changing. Secondly that a large incremental step towards completing your fifth political goal might be worth more than a small step towards your first.

To illustrate, here are some examples:

"I wish for world peace."

"That there is no more hunger."

"That every child, everywhere, gets a good education."

"That future generations will be more prosperous or happier than us."

EDIT: Maybe this part of the tutorial is too fast. Instead of just saying what one's preferences are, maybe one should try to discover them in a roundabout manner. This could be done by making a few more lists:

1) All possible systems of preferences. That is, all ways one can arrange every goal one wants to achieve. It should be theoretically limitless, but maybe ethical theories can serve as proxies.

2) Note all reasoning (such as thought experiments) that you are most certain of are true - that is, they yield a result of how you should act which is how you really want to act.

3) Note all reasoning which dismisses the most systems of preferences as not being true, not being what you want.

4) Note possible reasoning which would decide what preferences you really have, if you can determine the question correctly.

onsdag 24 juli 2013

Politics is the art of the possible. The
word 'politics' is derived from the Greek word 'poly', meaning many,
and the English word 'ticks', meaning blood sucking parasites.

Politics can be inspiring; there have been several groups that have
organized to achieve wonderful ends now and in the past. Such as ending
slavery, the subjugation of women, and the censorship of ideas. (None of
these have, however, been brought to their full completion yet.)

Politics can also be irritating. As when some politician or
bureaucrat wastes money or lies in a particularly annoying way, or when
the supporters of that politician or that bureau talk about the wonders
of politics while ignoring all its bad parts. (Politics can also be
horrible and devastating.)

Predictably, some of us who find politics today to be more irritating
than inspiring will define politics somewhat differently. For some,
politics is ”a relic of a barbaric past” because politics always
entails the threat of violence, and if we should ever find ourselves in a
better state of affairs, politics will have had nothing to do with it.
But many others would contend that wherever there's civic life there's politics – for some that's true even in a stateless society.

So, there's a little disagreement on the definition of politics. For
my part, I will use the latter definition, which contends that politics
deals with certain areas of life – regarding civic life, elections, war,
fund-raising for a cause, influencing cultural norms, establishing
alliances and so on. This is almost the same as the definition used by Wiktionary, but it seems to have a broader focus than the one used by Wikipedia. The goal of political action can then be said to be to act rationally in this domain, just as one would act rationally in any other domain.

That
definition isn't too detailed, so let me try and give a fuller
definition. I will do that by introducing a hypothetical scenario which
explores some fundamental political strategies:

You live in a
village by a river, and you are interested in building a bridge across
it. But a fisherman also lives in the village and if you'd build the
bridge it would make it difficult for him to fish during that time. No
one else will be directly effected by this project. You bring up the
issue with the fisherman and ask what he thinks about all this.

The
fisherman could then have two basic attitudes towards your project: it
would either be a concern for him or it wouldn't. If it is the latter,
then you are not in any conflict, but have a (weak) harmonious
relationship. All that remains is for you to build the bridge, which
I'll discuss later.

First, let's assume that the fisherman
opposes your plans. Let us assume that he is willing to physically
prevent you from building the bridge. What can you do then, given that
you still want to construct the bridge? It seems only these seven general
strategies are available:

Persuasion – You can try to
convince the fisherman that it is in his best interest that the bridge
be built, or that the construction will not disturb him so much as he
believes. That is, convince him that the project will not become
problematic for him.

Deceit – You can try to convince the fisherman that the construction won't be problematic, while lying.

Trade -
You take his stated preferences, true or not, as given and you offer
him something in return for letting you build the bridge.

Threat – You offer to give him something/do something to him which he does not want, if he doesn't let you build the bridge.

Bypass – You ignore the fisherman and try to build the bridge without him knowing about it.

Force –
You can try to physically stop him from preventing you to build the
bridge. As in, hitting him on the head, poisoning him or locking him
up.

Submission - You don't build the bridge.

(There might be other strategies I've missed, but for now it's not necessary to know all fundamental strategies.)

Suppose now that the fisherman doesn't mind at all that you build the bridge. Well then, what happens now?
Well, either you want the help of others in doing this or not. If
not, there's no more politics. If you do want the help of others, and
they are willing to help you, then everything is also settled. But, if
they do not want to help you right away, then you can use persuasion,
deceit, exchange, threats and force to get them to help you. Or you simply have to acquiesce in them not helping you. Bypassing is not an option here,
since that would be pointless.

Each option entails costs, and they could all have too high a cost so
that there's no point in going forth with anything. In that case, it's
time to do something else. On the other hand, the cost for each mode of
action might be so low that any option is advantageous. In that case
the only prudent move is to choose whatever has the lowest cost, the one
which let's you pursue and reach the largest number of your most highly
valued ends. The point is that not only does an option have costs in
money and time but it can also affect any further actions in, at least,
two ways. First off, if the action should fail, some, or all, of the
other options might become totally improbable to succeed. And secondly,
even if the action succeeds, it might have some negative effects in
other non-political circumstances, making it less likely to achieve your
goals. Thus, the costs worth pondering are the opportunity costs of an action - the loss is what you otherwise could have achieved.

It seems that every political problem can be seen through the lens
of this framework. Both for, loosely speaking, dealing with conflicts
and producing values. What about upholding laws that support certain
property rights? Well, you can persuade or force those who disagree with
the norms to accept them. You can even bargain with them. What about
helping those who are addicted to drugs? Same thing, you can either get
their consent or choose to force them. Everything can ultimately be seen
as how you interact with others.

What does this then tell us about the goal of political action? Well
suppose you need to interact with others regarding the bridge-project
(either with the fisherman or someone else). You will need to perceive
the effects of each path and compare their effects to choose whichever
is most beneficial to you. After that has been solved, that should be
the end of politics. But, what does it mean to solve the problem? Well,
what goals will be harder to reach if you choose to trick the fisherman
into letting you build the bridge? That depends on a lot of
circumstances, but, for most villages, I'd guess you lose any chance of
being on really good terms with the fisherman, and you'd lose favour
with most people in the village (if you weren't already dominant in the
village). And what if you'd traded with others to get their help in
constructing the bridge? You'd only lost the money, probably.

Now, maybe this doesn't feel like that hard of a problem. But let's
suppose that you will face one thousand such scenarios in your life,
every one of which are intertwined with each other. That is, you will
want to build a bridge, but you may also want to be friends to friends
of the fisherman, be on good terms with everyone in the village, be
secure in your property rights, help fund the building of a local town
hall, change the current law on building-restrictions, support the
abolishment of the Bakers' guild, do a whole lot of ordinary things and
so on. Now your choice in one area will have to fit with every other
area. Or, at least those you care about the most.

All of this calls for you to create a meta-strategy; a grand plan
plan so all those small plans are compatible with each other and will
produce the most benefit to you. How to make that plan and follow it
through is the essence of political choice, it's an essential part of
your goal in politics.

To know what plan to choose you need to know two things: (1) what
your political values/goals are and (2) what sort of political system
(society) would be best in promoting your goals.

If you know everything about your preferences, but nothing about
societies, then you can't support any complex system without running the
risk of supporting something which is totally detrimental to your
values. If you, on the other hand, know everything about how societies
function but are, somehow, unable to know what you really want, then you
cannot decide what society to strive towards.

The next two posts will discuss these two issues - first goals and thereafter means.

Politics is sometimes hard to discuss. Partly since most of us seem to
unconsciously take political matters with the same degree of
seriousness as our forefathers used to, because we use the same mode of
thought as they used to. Back then, a bad political choice or alliance,
could mean death, while the normal cost today in a democratic society
might be ridicule for having supported the losing team or position.

Nevertheless, politics should be taken seriously. Bad politics means
that it'll take longer for us humans to reach world peace, an end to
hunger and disease, and favourable conditions so that no one will create
an unfriendly AI. Therefore, discussing politics is vital so that,
someday, some collective actions could be performed to alter the
political course for the better.

But what should that collective action be? - what should the new
course(s) be? - and who should do it? - and what does "for the better"
imply? To engage in politics one needs to be able to give some (implicit
or explicit) answers to these questions. This can be done, and in so
doing one has constructed a political ideology - which might be similar
to existing ideologies or it might be different

.

A political ideology might be constructed in various ways. In this
and a few more posts I will propose one way of doing that. These posts
might be seen as a tutorial in constructing a political ideology. In
these posts I will not suggest an answer to what the best political
system should be, nor will I follow my own instructions. But if one
should follow these instructions I believe that one can answer the
questions mentioned above.